Moral Epistemology

How is moral knowledge possible? This question is central in moral
epistemology and marks a cluster of problems. The most important are
the following.

Sociological: The best explanation of the depth of moral
disagreements and the social diversity that they reflect is one of two
things. (a) No moral facts exist to be known, since moral disagreements
exemplify merely clashes in moral sensibility rather than differences
about matters of fact. (b) Moral knowledge exists, but moral facts are
relative to the social group in which moral sensibility is formed with
the result that no moral truths are known to hold universally.

Psychological: Moral judgments are intrinsically motivating.
Judgments about matters of fact, on the other hand, are never
motivating just in themselves. Since to constitute moral knowledge a
moral judgment must be made about some moral fact, moral knowledge is
not possible.

Ontological: Moral knowledge is about moral reality. How is that
reality constituted? Three general possibilities present themselves.
(a) Moral reality might be theological in nature, pertaining to (say)
the will of God. (b) It might be a non-natural realm that is neither
theological nor natural, but sui generis. (c) It might be
comprehensible as a part of the natural world studied by science. Each
of these possibilities, however, is beset with difficulties, and no
viable fourth alternative has been conceived.

Evolutionary: Where do human morals come from? A familiar and
widely accepted answer is that human morals are in essence, despite
their modern variations, Darwinian adaptations. As such morals are
about survival and reproduction and have nothing to do with moral
truth. Moreover, while the intuitive, emotional basis of moral
judgments was useful to our ancestors, this basis is out-dated and
unreliable in modern industrial society and thus current moral thought
in such society, which inevitably embeds this basis, is without
rational foundation.

Methodological: Traditionally philosophers have sought to explain
the possibility of knowledge by appeal to at least some principles
that can be grasped and defended a priori and thus independently of
natural science. A new and revolutionary epistemology introduced by
Quine seeks to explain the possibility of knowledge through science
itself. “Naturalized epistemology” has been immensely
popular since its inception in the 1960s, largely because it promises
to make epistemology consistent with a scientific world-view. At the
same time the new methodology appears to make it more difficult to
explain the possibility of moral knowledge. Two allied methodologies
that seek to find moral truth in a reflective equilibrium of judgments
or in applications of rational choice theory are much less restrictive
but open to the objection that they are morally conservative. A recent
methodology allied to naturalized epistemology is pragmatic
naturalism. Taking its inspiration from examples of transforming the
moral status quo, it is less vulnerable to the charge of moral
conservatism. However, by understanding moral knowledge as mainly a
matter of knowing how to live well interdependently with others by
resolving issues collectively as they arise, this methodology may not
offer a conception of moral truth appropriate to genuine moral
knowledge.

Moral: Feminists among others are often critical of traditional
epistemologies as well as the innovative recent methodologies on the
moral ground that the standards found there are unjustly biased
against women and other marginalized groups. For example, feminists
often reject the standard of impartiality contained in these forms of
epistemology because it renders invisible important knowledge
possessed by women and thereby contributes to their oppression. If,
for reasons to be given, the criticism has merit, then it presents an
apparent paradox within feminist moral epistemology, since it appears
to reject the ideal of impartiality on the ground that it is not
itself impartial. The Marxist complaint that the standard of
impartiality is unjustly biased against the working class because it
renders invisible their exploitation gives rise to the same
contradiction. Resolution of the paradox is important for both
evaluating such criticisms and understanding in general how to
evaluate moral criticisms of epistemic standards.

Arguably, these issues, as central and broad as they are, do not cover
all of moral epistemology. To keep the subject manageable, this entry
is limited in the following five ways.

First, the entry ignores global skepticism, which doubts the
possibility of anyone's having any knowledge at all. Thus, it ignores
the threat of an unstoppable regress in justifications and Cartesian
evil demon scenarios. Nor does it take up the debates between
foundationalists and coherentists about the structure of
justification. These issues (with an exception to be noted) do not
raise problems special to moral epistemology. But see the entry for
Moral Skepticism.

Second, in keeping with the last restriction, the entry takes for granted
that our capacity to have other kinds of knowledge is not in question.
Indeed, the six problems above arise in part because of the
implications of having other kinds of knowledge.

Third, the entry assumes that moral knowledge entails (roughly)
justified true moral belief. This assumption commits me to the
position that moral knowledge is incompatible with non-cognitivism
(the view that moral claims lack cognitive value, such as
truth-value). A non-cognitivist, however, may seek to explain how the
attitudes or prescriptions expressed in moral claims are
justified. (See Hare 1981, Campbell 1985, Gibbard 1990, and Blackburn
1998 for theories of moral justification compatible with
non-cognitivism and the entry on
moral skepticism
for a discussion of moral justification in general.) Indeed, an
expressivist may invoke a deflationary conception of truth to support
the idea that we can speak of justified moral beliefs that are “true”
— without implying that justified moral beliefs accurately
represent moral reality. Moral justification is discussed below,
however, only as it pertains to putatively reliable representations of
moral reality.

Fourth, many important epistemological issues arise in the context of
considering specific normative theories or types of normative
theory. (Can virtue ethics explain how we can know what course of
action is morally acceptable for a situation demanding the exercise of
conflicting virtues?) The focus in this entry is on issues that are
special to moral epistemology but not tied to a particular type of
normative theory. The feminist criticism cited, though it arises from
specific normative concerns, is no exception, since it raises general
worries about how moral knowledge is possible.

Fifth, the discussion of the history of moral epistemology is limited
to philosophers, such as Kant and Hume, who have had the most to say
about these issues and whose responses have been most
influential. Other historical positions and additional analysis of the
possibility of a priori moral knowledge will be covered in other SEP
entries.

People disagree about all kinds of things, from whether any milk is
left in the refrigerator to whether there is global warming. Some of
these disagreements are easily settled; others take a long time, even a
hundred years or more, to reach resolution. Moral disagreement is no
exception. That disagreement exists regarding moral questions is a
sociological fact that is beyond question. Moral disagreements,
however, appear to be particularly recalcitrant to resolution. Take the
morality of euthanasia or that of capital punishment. Each has been a
subject of moral disagreement for a long time. Moreover, it appears that people often
disagree even when they agree on non-moral facts. People can, for
example, disagree about whether capital punishment is ever morally
justified, even when they agree that it has no general deterrence
value, because one party believes it is a punishment that “fits”
certain crimes, no matter what its other consequences may be.

It would be a mistake to exaggerate the extent of moral
disagreement. There is considerable psychological and anthropological
evidence that a small number of core moral values are espoused
universally, such as: benevolence (avoiding harm to others and
offering aid when the costs are not high); fairness (reciprocating
help and sharing goods); loyalty (especially to family and community);
respect for authority (of one's parents and community leaders, when it
is exercised responsibly); personal purity in body and mind (notably
as it reflects moral character); and freedom (especially from
oppressive control by others). See Haidt 2012; Haidt & Joseph
2004. Thus, when there is no conflict in moral values, as in Peter
Singer's famous example of rescuing a toddler from drowning in a
shallow pond by wading into it and ruining one's new suit, there is
universal agreement about what a person ought to do across all
cultures (Singer 1972).

Nevertheless, these values are often interpreted and applied
differently not only across cultures but also across time within
roughly the same cultures. For instance, until recently the dominant
view in the United States and Europe has been that homosexuality is a
morally impure state but now the dominant view is that gay sex is not
inherently morally impure or unacceptable. What accounts for this
change? Moreover, the core moral values can conflict, as when loyalty
to family or religious authority demands that one not show benevolence
toward a despised outsider. What if the toddler to be rescued is from
the wrong tribe? Or take the extreme divide separating the politically
left and right over issues of freedom and fairness. Though each side
espouses the core values listed, they interpret them differently and
give them different priorities in cases of moral conflict. It is far
from clear how these kinds of moral disputes can ever be resolved.

These considerations lead to the following worry. If it is a
sociological fact that moral disagreements are generally more
recalcitrant to resolution than disputes which do not involve
differences about moral value — as I will assume for the sake of
argument — what explains this fact? A possible explanation is that
there is no fact of the matter about whether the practice in question
is morally right. People agree or disagree in their moral attitudes,
but there are no moral truths about which they can be mistaken. Hence,
nothing about which they have conflicting attitudes is or can be a
proper object of knowledge. In short, moral disagreements often resist
resolution, however intelligent, informed, and respectful the
disputants may be, because moral knowledge is impossible.

The style of argument here is that of inference to the best
explanation (Harman 1965). Even if the sociological premise is granted,
the conclusion is not guaranteed to be true. Rather we have reason to
believe the conclusion, assuming the premise is true, provided that no
other explanation better accounts for the truth of the premise. This
style of argument can be successful when no other explanation can
account for the truth of the premise. It may seem, however, that there
are plausible alternative explanations that are compatible with the
possibility of moral knowledge. Two main kinds of explanation are
particularly salient.

One explanation arises from cases of moral disagreement where the
prospects of resolution appear most remote. When the disputants are
from different cultures and their disagreement reflects a divergence in
values between the cultures in which the disputants were raised, there
may appear to be insufficient common ground on which to effect a
resolution. A moral relativist can explain this commonplace observation
with a theory of moral knowledge. A moral relativist can say that the
lack of resolution is to be explained by the fact that the moral
knowledge expressed by each disputant is relative to the culture in
which the person learned his or her values. Thus, when someone from a
culture in which women must veil their faces in public defends this
practice as morally appropriate and indeed required, the relativist
would interpret the defense as expressing knowledge of what is
acceptable and not acceptable in his or her culture. Similarly, when
the person coming from a culture in which the practice is not
appropriate or required disagrees, he or she is simply expressing
knowledge of what is acceptable morally in his or her culture. Each has
moral knowledge, despite the clash in their opinions, but their
knowledge has to be understood relative to the culture in which the
knowledge has its roots.

The brief description of moral relativism just given belies the
immense variety of forms in which it can be stated. Moral relativism
can be formulated to take account of differences in moral outlook
between different people within the same society to explain the
difficulty of reaching resolution when the general culture of the
disputants is the same. It can also be formulated to avoid reference
to an overarching non-relative moral claim and to allow criticism of
one's own culture. (See Harman 1975, 1978, and 1985; Lyons 1976; Wong
1984; Wiggins 1988; Sayre-McCord 1991; Braybrooke et
al. 1995; Copp 1995.) Nevertheless, can any view that makes
moral truth relative to culture or personal point of view save the
possibility of moral knowledge? An objection to relativism made famous
by G. E. Moore is telling in the present context (Moore 1912). If the
meaning of the claims were as described, so that each disputant would
be saying something true or possibly true of his or her own culture
(or point of view), there would be the notable logical consequence
that they would not be disagreeing with each other. Rather they would
be talking about different things. Moore takes it to be obvious that
real disputants would be disagreeing, since each claim should be taken
to be the contradictory of the other. Hence, since relativism implies
that no moral disagreement exists in this case, he rejects moral
relativism as being unable to account for the fact of moral
disagreement.

As a general objection to moral relativism, the objection is
unsuccessful, since it is possible to formulate moral relativism
without the assumption that moral judgments express true or false
claims. Thus, Charles Stevenson, who takes them to be expressions of
attitude, holds that people can disagree in attitude even if their
moral views have no truth-value and cannot be logically inconsistent in
the sense that Moore intended (Stevenson 1944 and 1963). The objection
is successful, however, against the attempt to save the possibility of
moral knowledge by interpreting the moral claims as being true or false
claims about different cultures or points of view. If each disputant,
in taking issue with the other, is disagreeing about what is true, then
the disputants cannot be making claims about different things and hence
cannot have knowledge of the kind the moral relativist supposes. If
they did, neither could be disagreeing about the truth of the other's
moral claim. In the next section we will return to the position that
moral claims are merely expressions of attitude, a position consistent
with the fact of moral disagreement. For now we should concede that
moral relativism does not offer a satisfactory explanation of how moral
knowledge is possible in cases of radical moral disagreement between
people of different cultures of subcultures.

Is there another way we might explain the fact of moral disagreement
without conceding the impossibility of moral knowledge? Any theory
that implies that moral knowledge is possible must face this question,
but in general a range of considerations is available that might
provide an alternative explanation depending on the nature of the
disagreement. They divide into three kinds: (a) disagreements about
non-moral facts, (b) factors that distort judgment, and (c)
disagreements about certain complex empirical facts that are also
moral facts. In the first category are disagreements about religious
facts, such as whether God exists. We will consider below the
relevance of theology to moral epistemology. For the present it is
sufficient to note that people with deep moral disagreements, say
regarding abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment, may have
different religious views. To the extent that these can be considered
non-moral views, for example, that God's will is unambiguously
expressed in the Bible, these differences may be able to explain the
moral disagreement. Moreover, if it is possible to know whether these
non-moral views are true, then we may be able explain moral
disagreement without conceding the impossibility of moral
knowledge. Other kinds of disagreements also fall into category (a).
People with different moral outlooks frequently disagree about the
psychological nature of humans and other animals or about large-scale
economic and social theories relevant to assessing the consequences of
economic and social policy. Disagreements about these difficult
non-moral questions, assuming that these are issues about which
objective knowledge is possible, could explain the absence of moral
agreement. Unless these explanations can be eliminated, the inference
from persistent moral disagreement to the impossibility of moral
knowledge is on shaky ground. In category (b) we can place such things
as having personal bias because of the implications of the issue at
hand, being in the grip of a social ideology, and feeling abnormally
depressed or fearful. A person, for example, who faces the death
penalty for a crime, or someone who has strong feelings of vengeance,
may not be able to form an objective view of the morality of capital
punishment. Again we have a possible alternative way to explain moral
disagreement. Finally, in category (c), if moral facts are extremely
complex empirical facts (see the discussion of moral naturalism
below), it is possible for moral disagreement to persist for the same
reason that disagreement over complex scientific questions can
persist.(For further discussion regarding moral disagreement see
Miller 1992. For recent empirical work suggesting that moral
disagreement cannot be explained away by one of the above means, see
Doris and Plakias 2008.)

Although the possibility of these alternative explanations does not
establish that moral knowledge is possible, anyone arguing to the
opposite conclusion by inference to the best explanation needs to make
a plausible case that they can all be eliminated. Moreover, as
defenders of moral knowledge point out, unless such a case is made out,
the default position should be that we know some moral truths.
Defenders note that moral language is formulated as if moral claims can
be true and that we worry about whether to believe certain moral claims
just as if truth is at stake. When challenged we appeal to evidence
just as we do in the instance of straightforwardly factual claims, and
we make logical inferences that conform to logical systems based on
claims having truth-values. Though these points are not decisive, they
underline the importance of eliminating alternative explanations of
moral disagreement before concluding that moral knowledge is
impossible.

An argument of David Hume provides a more direct threat to the
possibility of moral knowledge based on the fact that morals excite
our passions and motivate us to act. If morals are based on reason so
that they consist in true or false ideas, they would have to be in
themselves incapable of having this direct influence on our actions
(Hume, Treatise, Book III, Part I, Section I, Paragraph 6.)
As he famously said, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the
destruction of the whole world to the scratching of a finger (Book II,
Part III, Section III, Paragraph 6). The argument can be rendered for
our purposes as a valid deductive argument from three premises: (1) If
moral knowledge is possible, then some moral judgments are
beliefs. (2) Our moral judgments by themselves necessarily give us
some motivation to act, even without the accompaniment of already
existing desires. (3) A belief by itself, unaided by already existing
desires, can never give us any motivation to act. Therefore, moral
judgments are not beliefs. Therefore, moral knowledge is
impossible. Since the argument is manifestly valid in form, we need to
examine the premises to see if we should be persuaded.

Premise (1) appears to follow directly from the nature of knowledge.
If one knows that something is the case, then one must have some belief
or judgment about it and what one believes must truly be the case. If
one doesn't have any opinion about it or if one's opinion about it is
not true, then one doesn't know it. To say this much, of course, is not
to say that true opinion is sufficient for knowledge, but that one's
judgment is true has seemed to many philosophers to be a minimally
necessary condition for knowledge. Premise (2) states what many take to
be a minimally necessary condition for something to be a moral
judgment. If one claims that something is morally wrong, for example,
but one feels no disinclination to do it or to persuade others not to
do it, then either one is being insincere or else one is not really
making a moral claim. Notice that the premise does not imply that one
must act in accordance with the motivation felt. One can be overcome by
temptation or fear or have some other counterbalancing motivation that
leads one not to act in accordance with one's moral claim. The premise
says only that some motivation to act must exist. This view, called
“internalism”, entails that it is a logical or conceptual truth that
some degree of motivation is internal to the moral judgment itself.
Finally, premise (3), sometimes called “Hume's dictum”, is the view
that judgments of fact, apart from desires that might accompany them,
do not move us in any way. This view follows from the widely held
understanding of motivation as consisting of two kinds of mental state:
belief and desire (Davidson 1963 and 2001). Without a belief to guide
it, desire is blind. A desire for food will, for example, not move one
to eat unless one has identified something that one believes is food.
On the other hand, believing that food is before one won't move one to
eat, even in the slightest, if one has no desire at all to eat. In sum,
each premise has at least an initial plausibility. In fact, however,
the literature contains objections to each one. Let us turn to the
objections, taking the premises in reverse order.

Those who attack the third premise (but accept the other two premises)
see moral judgments as having the cognitive content of a true or false
judgment of fact and still being able to motivate the persons making
the judgment, independently of their antecedent desires. To judge an
action to be morally wrong, on their view, is to form a true (or
false) belief about a (supposed) moral fact. It is also to be
motivated to some degree to act on the basis of this judgment, not
because of some antecedent desire, but just because of the belief that
the action is wrong. Those who take this position sometimes allow that
motivation involves desire (for example, not to do the act). Thus they
can accept the general view of motivation as involving both belief and
desire, but they hold that the desire in this case arises purely from
the belief that the act is wrong. It is the moral belief itself that
accounts for the desire—and hence the motivation—without
the support of any desire that is already existing. They would claim,
moreover, that this picture comports well with the way moral demands
are perceived. We see something is wrong, even though we may have
wanted to do it before this point, and then we find ourselves wanting
not to do it because we see it as wrong. (See, for example, McNaughton
1988, Dancy 1993, Smith 1994, Little 1997.)

Premise (3) may not be so easily refuted. It derives support not just
from the view that motivation requires both belief and desire, but
also from a basic distinction made by Elizabeth Anscombe about the
different tasks performed by the states of belief and desire. Anscombe
asks us to think of a list of groceries that might serve either as an
inventory of the food in a grocery store or as a shopping list
(Anscombe 1963). In the first case it merely describes, truly or
falsely, what is in the store. If it is a good inventory, the list
conforms to the items of food in the store. In the second case the
list remains a good shopping list even if the items are not in the
shop; in this case it is the store, not the list, that needs to
change. Beliefs are like inventories; desires are like shopping
lists. They have different and opposite “direction of fit.” We want
our beliefs to fit the world and to change when they don't. But we
want the world to fit our desires and to change when it doesn't. In
light of this distinction, it may seem that to reject premise (3) for
the reasons given is to suppose that moral judgments necessarily have
both directions of fit simultaneously. Is this view of moral judgment
coherent? In the case of lack of fit between the moral judgment and
the moral facts, the view seems to imply that the moral judgment
should change and not change. (For more on direction of fit, see Smith
1987 and Copp and Sobel 2001.)

The matter does not rest here, however. The critic of premise (3) can
point out that moral beliefs are unlike grocery inventories, since the
part of the world that they are designed to fit is the part that tells
us how we ought to be morally, rather than the part that tells how we
are non-morally. Therefore, the moral reality that a moral judgment is
designed to fit is distinct from the non-moral part of the world (our
behavior) that may need to change in order to fit the moral
judgment. Both directions of fit apply, in other words, but they
relate moral beliefs to different parts or aspects of reality, moral
in one case and non-moral in the other. Contradiction is thus avoided.
Nevertheless, if moral judgments have both directions of fit in the
manner suggested, then there must be moral facts that are inherently
prescriptive, demanding that we change ourselves to conform to them.
Such facts would be ontologically strange, as John Mackie has noted,
very unlike anything studied in science (Mackie 1977). The critic of
premise (3) may, however, be prepared to live with this result. (We
will take up this ontological issue in the next section.) What may be
more difficult to live with is rejection of recent results in
neuroscience. Timothy Schroeder (2004) argues that, except for its
content, moral motivation is not different in its neurobiological
basis from other kinds of deliberative motivation. In particular,
moral representations of right and wrong move us through projections
on the orbitofrontal cortex in the same way that representations of
favorite foods move us. That is, they do not move us directly through
projections on our motor centers independently of our desire for the
things represented (as is the case with behavioral tics).

Let us turn now to premise (2). A critic of internalism can allow
that moral beliefs are normally associated with some desire to conform
to them but would deny that the link between belief and desire in such
cases is anything more than contingent. To take a simple example to
convey the general idea, imagine a utilitarian interpretation of the
content of moral judgments. Suppose, that is, that to judge that an act
is wrong is to imply that the act leads to a lower net balance of
happiness over unhappiness (summed over everyone affected) than some
alternative act would. It is possible from an externalist perspective
to judge an act wrong but feel no disinclination to perform it. This
result might obtain even if the act leads to horrible suffering on the
part of everyone else and the person who makes the judgment is fully
aware of this fact and of the content of the judgment. Such cases are
admittedly pathological, but the point is that they are at least
logically possible contrary to premise (2). Normally, people aren't
like that. In fact, an externalist can argue that most people are
socialized so that they have some feeling for the feelings of others.
For this reason they will feel some motivation to act in accord with
their moral judgments on a utilitarian interpretation of their content.
The connection between the content of the judgment and the motivation,
however, is external, in the sense that the connection is mediated by
the contingent fact that people are normally socialized to care to some
degree about others (Brink 1989).

The internalists can make at least two kinds of reply. First of all,
while they will concede the existence of people who feel no motivation
to do what they say they “ought” to do, they can deny that these people
have made genuine moral judgments. There is a manner of speaking in
which we can say that something is wrong but mean only that this is
what is considered wrong around here or in the culture under
discussion. The trouble is that disputes over whether the examples in
question are cases of genuine moral judgment can easily degenerate into
exercises in stipulative definition and the trading of intuitions
tutored by divergent theories. It is moot whether anything can settle
this matter (Fenske 1997). A more promising line of reply is to point
out that the externalist's theory of moral motivation does not sit
comfortably with the way we learn to receive moral criticism and make
moral judgments. From an early age we learn to respond to moral
judgments made by our elders and to form them ourselves through
learning how to respond emotionally to various morally important
situations. We learn to feel badly about types of things judged by
others to be wrong, like being unkind or dishonest, and then express
negative attitudes toward these things when we make moral judgments
ourselves. In these cases it would appear that the disinclination to do
what is wrong and the inclination to discourage others from doing it
are not mediated by an appreciation of the abstract content of the
judgment and its bearing on things that we independently find
displeasing. The tie between moral judgment and motivation appears to
be direct, much like that suggested by the internalist.

We can see another way to view this problem by moving to an
assessment of premise (1). This premise presupposes that if someone has
moral knowledge, then this person makes a moral judgment the content of
which is a true proposition. It appears, then, that the premise presupposes
that the moral judgment in such cases is a moral belief rather than a
desire or an emotion or something else that cannot be literally true.
This position has indeed been the view of the internalists who reject
premise (3) but accept premises (1) and (2). They agree that the moral
judgment leads directly to a desire, but they maintain that it is in
its content simply a belief. Should the critics of this argument accept
this presupposition? Here is an important reason to question it.

We can view “belief” and “desire” as distinct
functional descriptions that tell us how mental states falling under
one label or the other work in interaction with other mental states
and issue in behavior. The previous talk of directions of fit can be
taken to illustrate these distinct functions. We might then think of a
moral judgment as a complex mental state that normally exemplifies
both functions (Campbell 1998 and 2007). Moral judgment might be
thought of as a natural kind in which the two functions comprise a
homeostatic unity (Kumar 2015). In its primitive form moral judgment
might have functioned simply to motivate conformity to norms learned
in early socialization, accounting for the apparent direct association
of moral judgments with motivation. It might later have evolved to
take on higher cognitive functions that incline many people to think
of it as a moral belief. On this view it is normally both, contrary to
the presupposition that moral judgments are essentially beliefs. As
such, moral judgments would not be disbarred from exemplifying moral
knowledge. At the same time the position would not run afoul of Hume's
dictum. In fact, it would be a kind of externalism, allowing that in
abnormal cases one function or the other would not be present. For
example, if one is raised to believe that gay sex is wrong, one may at
first continue to feel one's former emotions and motivations in this
regard even after forming the considered belief that gay sex is not
wrong. Or one may judge something not to be wrong but feel deep
resentment or indignation, say when one is a woman who is unfairly
passed over for a promotion but one does not believe at first that one
has been treated unfairly. In this case one's emotional and
motivational response, if it is sustained and leads one to form a new
belief, that one has been treated unfairly, may constitute a negative
moral judgment, even before the change in belief. (We return to this
example in 4.3 below.) Although these few remarks hardly demonstrate
the viability of this hybrid view, anyone defending premise (1) on the
assumption that moral judgments are essentially beliefs needs to
consider this alternative and rule it out.

The hybrid conception of moral judgment is not inconsistent with
premise (1), if we are prepared to interpret it as implying only that
for moral knowledge to be possible moral judgments are sometimes
(true) beliefs, not that they are always nothing but beliefs. Recall
premise (1): If moral knowledge is possible, then our moral judgments
are beliefs. If moral judgments are normally combinations of belief,
emotion, and motivation, but are sometimes just beliefs and sometimes
just emotional and motivational responses, then it is possible to
accept premises (1), (2), and (3) and the possibility of moral
knowledge. The reason is that one can accept that moral judgments can
be true, without either denying that moral judgments normally motivate
directly or implying that moral beliefs sometimes motivate directly
independently of antecedent desires. This hybrid conception must be
distinguished from internalist theories that construe moral judgments
as “besires” (things that are necessarily beliefs and desires—see
Altham 1987). Unlike these theories the above hybrid conception allows
these elements to separate, as in the examples of changing one's moral
judgment about gay sex or a failed promotion. It must also be
distinguished from theories that allow that moral judgments have both
functions but give priority to either the belief side (Copp 2001) or
the expressive side (Ridge 2006). The first variety would deny that
responses that are emotional and motivational but are not beliefs
could be moral judgments, however moral in character those responses
might be. The second would deny that responses that are only beliefs
could be moral judgments in themselves. Which hybrid theory of moral
judgment is preferable, if any, is a matter of controversy.

The most direct challenge to moral knowledge is to question whether
anything exists that could possibly serve as a suitable object of such
knowledge. If no
conception of what moral reality would have to be like fits our
understanding of the kinds of things that exist, then moral knowledge
is not possible. In
general, the candidates for possible objects of moral knowledge divide
into three categories: natural (objects that are knowable only through
experience), non-natural (but not supernatural), and theological (or
supernatural). We will assess reasons for thinking that none of these
categories provide suitable objects of moral knowledge, treating them
in reverse order.

An ancient view still popular today is that moral knowledge must
ultimately be based on the will or commandments of the Creator. This
view faces two major problems. First, there is the obvious difficulty
that skepticism about God's existence is at least as difficult to lay
to rest as skepticism about moral knowledge. Since arguments for and
against the existence of God are assessed elsewhere in this
Encyclopedia, I will not stop to rehearse them here. Second,
there is the further difficulty that even if we are confident about
God's existence, it is not clear how we can interpret the will or
commandments of God without first having moral knowledge, thus making
this reply to the skeptic question-begging.

The latter problem arises from a dilemma posed in Plato's
Euthyphro. In this dialogue Euthyphro tries to explain to
Socrates that piety is what the gods love. Socrates then asks Euthyphro
whether the gods love the pious because they are good or whether the
pious are good because the gods love them. To put the dilemma in terms
relevant to the present context, consider the view that genocide is
wrong because it is contrary to God's will. (The argument doesn't
change if we talk about commandments or love instead of will.) We can
ask of this view whether God forbids genocide because it is wrong, or
whether it is wrong because God forbids it. In the latter case God's
will appears to be arbitrary or at least not based on an appropriate
moral reason. For believers who regard God as supremely moral, the
latter possibility would be unacceptable. In the former case, however,
God's will would be based on the wrongness of genocide, conceived as
being separate from and logically prior to the concept of God's will.
Hence, in this case the appeal to God's will does not provide an answer
to the skeptic, but rather presupposes that we already have an answer.
In sum, unless we are prepared to suppose that what God wills, loves,
or commands has no moral basis, the attempt to base the possibility of
moral knowledge on knowledge of God's will or love or commandments is,
like Euthyphro's explanation of piety, viciously circular. (For
discussion of other versions of the objection, see Chandler 1984 and
Westmoreland 1996. Also see the entry on
theological voluntarism.)

One might suppose that the obvious alternative is to think of moral
reality as embedded in the natural world as opposed to the
supernatural. However, for reasons that we will turn to shortly, many
philosophers have strongly resisted this option and have proposed that
moral knowledge has its basis in non-natural aspects of the world that
can be apprehended only through a faculty of moral intuition or reason
that is independent of sense experience. Moral reality, so conceived,
is posited as sui generis, reducible to neither the natural nor the
supernatural and requiring a mode of apprehension comparable to
mathematical intuition.

An immense variety of views fall within this category. At one extreme
is the idea that we can apprehend a priori a general principle from
which we can derive particular moral claims using non-moral facts as
minor premises. According to Henry Sidgwick (Sidgwick, The Methods
of Ethics, 1907), we know a priori several self-evident axioms
that are objectively true, including axioms of benevolence and
justice, and that lead together to the conclusion that each of us
ought to do what will bring about the best consequences when their
value is known by the ratio of pleasure over pain in them viewed
impartially. (See de Lazari-Radek & Singer, 2014, for an
up-to-date exposition and defense of Sidgwick's famous work in light
of current issues in moral philosophy and Sidgwick's struggle to do
justice to Egoism.) Sidgwick's ethical theory, a form of
utilitarianism, contrasts with Kant's deontological theory, according
to which we know, again a priori, that we ought to treat each person
as an end, never merely as a means (Kant, Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals, 1785). Both imply specific moral
conclusions, such as that a given promise ought to be kept, once we
understand what is involved in breaking and keeping the promise,
either regarding their consequences (Sidgwick) or regarding what is
entailed in the will to do either act (Kant). The important point is
that the derivations depend on assuming as a premise something that
can be known only a priori.

At the other extreme are forms of moral particularism, according to
which one directly intuits the moral rightness or wrongness of an act
once one has understood its particular natural features (see the entry
on
moral particularism).
As in
the previous case it is necessary to comprehend the non-moral features
of the situation before a specific moral judgment can be made and known
to be true. In making this judgment, however, one must rely not merely
on knowledge of these non-moral features but on one's ability to intuit
the moral significance of these features. The difference between the
cases is only that in the first we appeal to a general principle, while
in the second we intuit the moral truth directly. In both, moral
intuition is essential to arriving at moral knowledge. W. D. Ross
provides an example of a mixed form of moral intuitionism (Ross 1930).
On his theory we have an intuitive grasp of principles that tell us
what we ought to do “other things being equal” (e.g., one ought to be
kind, other things being equal). Then we must use moral intuition again
to decide in a given case, which may involve conflicting principles,
what action we ought to perform, all things considered.

One concern about all forms of moral intuitionism is the fact that
people can continue to disagree about the moral facts when they appear
to agree on the non-moral facts. If we all possess the same faculty of
moral intuition, should such disagreement be possible at all? But the
moral intuitionist can counter this objection in the way suggested
earlier when we considered the argument against the possibility of
moral knowledge based on disagreement. There are too many other
factors that may explain disagreement without giving up the assumption
that we share a faculty of moral intuition. Another concern is that we
learn what is right and wrong initially from examples and advice of
our elders. Isn't this fact about moral development inconsistent with
the idea that morals are based ultimately on a priori intuition? It
appears not. We begin to learn mathematics in a similar way, using
concrete examples and relying on authority. Then, as we develop
understanding, we are eventually able to grasp relevant truths, such
as that 2 + 2 = 4, in a way that is not dependent on the vagaries of
experience. If we put two oranges in a hat and then add two more and
subsequently find five there, we assume an extra one was there to
begin with or that it is a trick hat or that the oranges can
mysteriously reproduce themselves. We don't doubt that 2 + 2 =
4. Similarly, it may be argued, once we grasp the wrongness of
treating another person merely as a means, finding many examples of
this treatment or many people who think the treatment is right won't
in the least alter, or even seem relevant to, our perception of its
wrongness. (See, however, Sinnott-Armstrong 1988, and the reply by
Shafer-Landau 1988.)

A less superficial objection is that it is possible to explain both
the origin and usefulness of our moral perceptions without supposing
that any non-natural moral realm exists as an object of moral
knowledge. This objection is similar to the last in that it emphasizes
our dependence on examples and authority in acquiring moral perceptions
that are stable once the relevant non-moral facts are at hand, but the
claim is not that this dependence is inconsistent with the existence of
a non-natural moral reality. Rather the claim is that postulating the
latter reality is unnecessary to comprehending all the facts about
moral development and the social usefulness of moral codes. We don't
need to assume such a reality in order to explain all that is beyond
doubt and hence don't need to postulate a faculty of moral intuition of
any of the kinds just canvassed. Moral intuition and the moral
knowledge it is presumed to make possible are redundant hypotheses that
we can safely discard. It is largely this dismissal of moral
intuitionism that has given rise in the second half of the last century
to moral naturalism as the dominant moral theory among those who
continue to believe that moral knowledge is possible. (For further
discussion see the entry on
moral non-naturalism.)

Moral naturalism (as a form of cognitivism) maintains that, while a
distinction can be drawn between moral facts and other kinds of facts,
moral facts are among the natural facts of the world. An advantage of
this position for explaining the possibility of moral knowledge is that
nearly everyone who rejects global skepticism grants that knowledge of
natural facts is possible. The moral naturalist, therefore, is in a
position to argue that moral knowledge should not be more problematic
than other kinds of knowledge of the natural world. A moral naturalist
can, moreover, reply to the charge that moral facts are redundant for
explaining the facts of the natural world by pointing out that the
burden of proof is on the critic to demonstrate that those natural
facts that are also moral facts have no explanatory power. Certainly
they cannot be said to lack explanatory power for the reason that they
are not part of the natural world. Nor can they be said to be
inaccessible to empirical study, since as part of the natural world
they are knowable through experience (Copp 1995, p. 27).

3.3.1 Identity, supervenience, and redundancy

It is important, however, to distinguish in this regard between two
different kinds of moral naturalism. One kind maintains that moral
properties are identical with certain natural properties specified by
combinations of non-moral terms found in the natural and social
sciences (Brandt 1979, Railton 1986, Copp 1995). To take an
oversimplified example, suppose that the property of being a wrong act
is identical with the property of having as a consequence a lower
quotient of pleasure over pain for all affected by the act than an
alternative act would. Here a moral property of being a wrong act is
held to be one and the same property as a complex utilitarian property
specified in the non-moral terms of consequence, pleasure, and pain.
Given this identity, an act having this moral property cannot be less
open to empirical study nor can it have less explanatory power than an
act's having the property of not maximizing pleasure over pain. For
instance, if a group avoids a certain kind of action, the correct
explanation, given the identity and the role of pleasure and pain in
learning, could be that this kind of act is wrong. Whether it is or not
would be an empirical question.

The situation is more complex, however, for the other form of moral
naturalism. It maintains that moral facts are natural facts but denies
that they are specifiable using the language of the natural and social
sciences (Kim 1978, Sturgeon 1985, Brink 1989). Moral facts are said to
be natural facts in that they are discoverable empirically and provide
causal explanations of events in the natural world. At the same time,
they are a unique category that defies identification in non-moral
terms. As such, they raise again the issue of redundancy. Do we really
need this special category of natural facts in order to understand the
natural world? In this view some natural facts are supposed to
supervene on others. That is to say, moral facts are dependent
on distinct natural facts specifiable in non-moral terms in the
following way: if the moral facts were otherwise, necessarily the
distinct non-moral facts on which they depend would have to be
different. Take a deliberate act of cruelty done just for fun. This act
is wrong in virtue of being a deliberate act of cruelty done just for
fun. The fact that it is a wrong act and the fact that it is
deliberately cruel done for fun are distinct facts, but the first
depends on the second. Necessarily, if what was done had not been wrong,
it would not have been a deliberate act of cruelty done for fun. Once
this relation of supervenience is recognized, it is possible to defend
the non-redundancy of moral facts by pointing out parallel relations of
supervenience in the non-moral natural world and arguing that the
redundancy objection proves too much, asking us to reject other
non-moral categories that appear ontologically sound. For example,
genetic facts obtaining at the cellular level are said to supervene on
genetic facts at the molecular level without one being simply identical
with the other (Kitcher 1984), yet it would be absurd from a scientific
perspective to deny the existence of facts at the cellular level.
Whether this defense is ultimately successful remains to be seen, but
at the present time it is far from clear that either form of naturalism
can be rejected on grounds of redundancy (Sayre-McCord 1988).

3.3.2 Reasoning from experience?

We began with an objection to moral naturalism that applies as well
to moral non-naturalism, noting that the former is in a better position
to meet it. Let us now direct our attention to an important objection
that applies specifically to moral naturalism. Kant argues
(Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Chapter 2, paragraph
five) that moral knowledge cannot be based on experience of the natural
world. We might interpret one of his arguments as having the following
structure. (a) If we have moral knowledge at all, we must know a
general moral truth from which we can deduce specific conclusions. But
(b) we could know this general truth on the basis of experience only by
generalizing from examples of right and wrong that we encounter in
experience. Consider then, as a specific example, an act of deliberate
cruelty done for fun. How would we know that this is a wrong act or a
right act? We must infer it from a general moral truth, according to
(a), but to explain how we know a general moral truth, we must, given
(b), experience specific examples of right and wrong, and now we are
back where we began. To avoid this circle, we must assume that we know
a priori that some act or kind of act is wrong. In general, it follows that
no moral knowledge is based solely on experience. Moral naturalism
cannot, therefore, provide an appropriate ontology for moral
knowledge.

Kant's argument is particularly powerful because the assumptions on
which it is built are fairly weak, indeed much weaker than they might
at first appear to be. At times Kant argues that moral knowledge cannot
be based on experience because it requires knowledge of absolutely
universal truths that transcend all earthly experience, but this
argument does not need that strong assumption. In fact, the argument
would work even if (contrary to Kant) the most basic moral principle
has many exceptions and is true only some of the time. Arguably we
would still need to appeal to examples if we are to learn from
experience when the principle applies and when it doesn't, and then we
would need some way to determine the moral status of the examples. But,
again, it would be question begging to assume that knowledge of their
moral status comes from experience rather than a priori, since the
possibility of this is what is at issue.

The essence of the argument can be put in more general terms. Both
forms of moral naturalism entail that facts that are specifiable in
non-moral terms determine the moral facts, where the determination
involves either identity or else supervenience without identity. But
which moral facts do they determine? Most philosophers will grant that
natural facts (or properties) that are specifiable non-morally can be
experienced. The problem is in making the step from the latter kind of
fact to a moral fact just to establish the moral fact in
even one example. Appeal to experience, it may seem, cannot completely
account for this step without circularity.

A difficulty for the argument, however, is that it turns on a narrow
conception of reasoning from experience. The argument assumes that
reasoning from experience must begin with clear cases of knowledge, at
least regarding the things observed in experience, and then infer more
general knowledge. This way of thinking about empirical reasoning has
a long tradition and was dominant among empiricist philosophers in the
first half of the twentieth century. In the second half, thinking
about reasoning in science changed dramatically. One prominent
alternative view is that general hypotheses offer explanations of
experience, and that we reason from experience by inferring the best
explanation of our data against a background of theoretical
assumptions that are subject to tests on other occasions and in other
contexts. Two important differences are that we don't begin with firm
knowledge and, second, that we rely on background information to
determine the best explanation. The relevance for moral knowledge is
clear enough. We can begin with mere moral beliefs and feelings
(rather than moral knowledge) yet reason to a conclusion implying
moral knowledge if the conclusion provides the best explanation of the
beliefs and feelings (Sturgeon 1985). Since the starting points are
not assumed to be cases of moral knowledge, the problem of circularity
does not arise in the way implied by the above argument. Whether the
background information contains moral knowledge is a further issue (to
be taken up in section 5), but nothing in this alternative conception
of reasoning from experience necessitates that the reasoning assumes
moral knowledge. Unless this alternative conception can be eliminated,
the Kantian argument is at best inconclusive.

3.3.3 The naturalistic fallacy and the open question argument

The last suggestion turns on a step in reasoning that moves from
facts that can be specified non-morally and are taken on all sides to
be open to empirical study to moral facts. This step has been claimed
by numerous philosophers to be a fallacious step in deductive
reasoning. Some of these philosophers hold that the moral claims are
not true or false and hence cannot express moral knowledge (Ayer 1946,
Stevenson 1944 and 1963, Hare 1952 and 1981, Gibbard 1990, Blackburn
1984 and1998). Others, such as Kant and G. E. Moore, hold that moral
knowledge is possible but not deducible from experience of the natural
world. Moore's argument, however, is worth considering in its own
right, since it has had significant influence since he first
articulated it in 1903 and differs from Kant's. For Moore, what would
have to be the case to allow the reasoning to go through would be the
identity of a moral property with a property specifiable in terms
describing the natural world. For example, if the property of being
morally good is the same as the property of being pleasurable, then
from the empirically ascertainable fact that an activity is pleasurable
one can deduce that the activity is morally good. Moore thought,
however, that no naturalistically specifiable property, such as being
pleasurable, could possibly be the same as a moral property. In fact,
his position was more general. He called it a “naturalistic fallacy” to
suppose that a moral property is the same as some natural property,
however the latter property might be specified. In his language, moral
naturalism, in either to the two forms considered, would be an example
of the naturalistic fallacy.

It is worth noting an important respect in which Moore's argument
differs from Kant's. While Kant's argument is about the nature of
reasoning to moral conclusions, Moore's is focused directly on the
identity of moral properties, however they might be known. Moore thinks
that moral properties are not natural and therefore cannot be known by
experience. Kant, reasoning in the reverse, thinks that moral
properties cannot be known by experience and hence cannot be natural
properties. Since natural properties are known through experience and
at issue is whether moral properties are natural properties, it is easy
to miss this critical difference. Whether Moore's reasons for thinking
that moral properties are not natural turn out to be good reasons, he
succeeded in focusing the debate on the strictly ontological issue of
identity.

Why does Moore think that the identity in question is impossible,
apart from our methods of reasoning? Moore's answer is his “open
question argument” (Moore, 1903). Moore reasons, if the identity
illustrated in the last example were to hold, it would be odd to ask,
“I know this activity is pleasurable, but is it morally
good?” After all, if being pleasurable just is the property of
being morally good, then to ask this would be like asking, “I
know this activity is pleasurable, but is it pleasurable?” Since
the original question is “open,” rather than silly or
self-answering, the identity must not obtain. Since exactly the same
point can be made regarding any putative identity between a moral
property and a natural property, Moore concludes that no such identity
is possible.

The open question argument has not been persuasive for several
reasons. Two are especially notable. Moore's target was the moral
naturalist who thought that the identities in question might be
established on the basis of conceptual analysis. It has been pointed
out, however, that the question might still be open for someone
provided that this person is not aware of the identity, not having
carried out the analysis (Brandt 1959). Current versions of moral
naturalism, moreover, do not propose that the identity would be known
by a priori reasoning. The identity is conceived instead to be
analogous to those identities discovered in the sciences, such as the
identity claimed to exist between genes and strings of DNA or the
well-accepted identity between water and H2O. Obviously, whether genes
are DNA or whether water is H2O have been open questions at one time.
In the case of DNA the question is still open for some. The reason is
that these identities are established a posteriori. Perhaps Moore is
right to deny the putative identity, but his open question argument
fails to establish that he is.

3.3.4 Moral reasoning from the first-person perspective

Despite the failure of Moore's argument, the question of the
identity of moral properties with natural properties remains a hotly
contested issue. Many believe that if Moore gave the wrong reason for
disputing the possibility of these identities, he was still right to
draw our attention to the apparent difference between a property that
describes a natural feature of the world and a property that has
prescriptive or normative significance for us. The latter tells us how
things ought to be rather than telling us how things are. How could
properties that play such different roles in our reflections about the
world be the same?

This question may be interpreted in different ways. We might
emphasize the immediate relevance of moral properties for our
motivation to act, contrasting it with the merely indirect relevance of
natural properties. This interpretation, however, would take us back to
the debate between internalists and externalists that we have already
explored. A quite different interpretation focuses on the perceived
role of moral properties in moral reflection and judgment from the
perspective of someone engaged in moral reflection and judgment. Two
cases are particularly relevant. Suppose, to take Harman's example,
that I suddenly see hoodlums setting a cat on fire (Harman 1977). I may
form an immediate judgment, without any conscious reflection, that what
they are doing is wrong. In another case I may find myself perplexed
about whether euthanasia is wrong and begin to reflect on why I should
regard it one way or another. Each case presents an apparently strong
contrast to the style of thinking that engages me if I were suddenly to
recognize the presence of a cat or were to reflect on whether a certain
contested property of a natural system really exists. Let us explore
these cases in turn.

When we make an immediate moral judgment that the hoodlums are doing
wrong, we might be said to be making an inference, however unconscious.
We infer from our belief that the hoodlums are engaged in an act of
cruelty, done for fun, that what they are doing is wrong. Grant for the
sake of argument that there is an inference here. Clearly it is not an
inductive inference, such as an inference to the best explanation of
their setting the cat on fire. The judgment that their act is wrong
does not explain what they are doing, nor would we likely say that
their torturing the cat for fun provides empirical evidence that they are doing
wrong. Our thinking in this case simply does not resemble, at least not
as seen from the inside, anything like an inductive inference, as the
identity thesis of moral naturalism would appear to require. Moreover,
if someone did not reach the conclusion that the hoodlums were acting
wrongly, even though she believed that they were torturing the cat for
fun, we would think her guilty of moral insensitivity. We would not
charge her with having made some perceptual error or a mistake in
reasoning. The latter could be appropriate criticism, however, if she
were making an inductive inference based on her perception. The kind of
criticism that is appropriate for failing to make the correct judgment
is different in each case, contrary to what we should expect if the
identity thesis is true.

The objections here may not be decisive, however. (See Copp 2000 for
the following rebuttal.) The best explanation of how we reason in
judging the hoodlums to be doing wrong is that we think in general that
acts of deliberate cruelty done for fun are wrong and subsume this case
under that general rule. The moral judgment is the result of a simple
inference from the fact that the hoodlums are committing such an act.
For this reason our thinking contrasts sharply with inductive
reasoning. We are, in fact, reasoning deductively. It is important to
notice, however, that although our reasoning is deductive, nothing says
that the premises of our reasoning are not empirical. Similar reasoning
occurs frequently in science. I may notice a copper wire and
immediately infer that it conducts electricity on the basis of my
knowledge that in general copper is a good conductor of electricity.
The main premise is obviously empirical, even though I am reasoning
deductively. Such examples are a dime a dozen. The example need not,
therefore, force us to the conclusion that non-inductive reasoning in
the moral case is different in some basic way. Analogues to moral
sensitivity exist in cases where people's interests and training make
them sensitive to horticultural, fiscal, and emotional facts. Moral
sensitivity is a heightened tendency to notice morally relevant
features of situations. But some people have a heightened awareness of
plants or financial trends or the emotional states of others. We do not
want to conclude that these objects of heightened awareness are not
natural features of the world.

Consider finally the case where we are puzzling about the morality
of euthanasia. If we are puzzled, we do not leap to a conclusion.
Instead we reflect upon similar examples and general moral principles,
trying to arrive at a balanced view of the morally relevant features of
the case at hand. Perhaps there are analogues to how we would behave
when puzzled about a scientific question. Notice, however, that most
people would not engage in the type of investigation that we should
expect if moral wrongness were a property that is identical to a
complex natural property whose presence is open to empirical study.
Consider the following summary account of the natural property that
Copp takes to be identical to that of being wrong. On his theory to
claim that something is wrong is to ascribe to it the property of
violating a standard or norm that would be a justified moral standard
for the relevant society. “A moral standard is relevantly justified
just in case (roughly) its currency in the social code of the relevant
society would best contribute to the society's ability to meet its
needs — including its needs for physical continuity, internal harmony
and co-operative interaction, and peaceful and co-operative relations
with its neighbors.” (Copp 2000, pp. 47–8) Surely, when people engage
in moral reflection to resolve their puzzlement about a moral issue,
they do not attempt an empirical study of the kind that would be called
for if the puzzlement were about whether this complex natural property
obtains.

The general objection, it should be stressed, is not limited to
Copp's theory. The objection can be put equally forcefully for any of
the other prominent theories of moral naturalism. Copp has a rebuttal,
however, that would apply generally for the other naturalistic moral
theories that entail an identity of the kind under attack. Consider a
piece of paper that has the property of being a U.S. dollar bill. To
state in the terms of economic theory the truth conditions for a piece
of paper having this property would be a task beyond the competence of
most people. It would involve minimally the dispositions of relevant
officials and the rest of the U.S. population to exchange goods and
services for the price of one dollar. The task would not end here,
however, since we would need to spell out in empirically testable terms
who counts as a relevant official, who counts as part of the U.S.
population, and what it means for something to be “priced at one
dollar.” On the other hand, most people would know whether a piece of
paper is a U.S. one dollar bill and would know it at once just by
inspection. Moral naturalists can contend, indeed, that most people on
seeing a U.S. dollar bill would arrive correctly and reliably at the
conclusion that it is one. Moreover, they would be able do this as
easily as they would conclude correctly and reliably that the hoodlums
are doing something horribly wrong on seeing them set a cat on fire
(Copp 2000).

Now imagine that we are puzzled about whether a piece of paper is a
U.S. one dollar. Perhaps we have heard on the radio that counterfeit
U.S. one dollar bills have been recently exchanged in our neighborhood.
We would try to compare it to bills that have come from elsewhere that
we are sure are not counterfeit or perhaps get the advice of an expert.
We would likely not, however, appeal to the general theoretical
identity mentioned earlier and attempt to verify the authenticity of
the bill by reference to it. We should, it can thus be argued, reject
the inference that identities of the kind in question do not exist
because we would not appeal to them when we are puzzled about specific
cases. The non-moral analogue undermines the inference from the case of
euthanasia. The identities can come into play when foundational issues
are raised. If the question is whether to devalue the U.S. dollar or
whether it should be tied to the gold standard, then the theoretical
specification of what constitutes a U.S. dollar may come into play and
may be important to explain the force of certain arguments pro or con.
But, similarly, the moral naturalist can argue that for foundational
moral issues, such as whether animals or human fetuses have rights, the
theoretical identities, concerning say what it is for something to have
a moral right, become directly relevant to discussion. In sum, unless
the non-moral cases can be shown to be disanalogous to the moral ones,
the objection does not defeat moral naturalism.

It is worth noting that the last three objections to moral naturalism
are advanced by those who believe moral knowledge is possible but
reject the idea that it is knowledge of the natural world. Of course,
should those objections be successful, the upshot could be a victory
for the moral skeptic, since the objections to thinking of moral
knowledge as theological or as knowledge of a non-natural world may be
just as successful. The problems for the possibility of moral
knowledge, in short, must be seen holistically in view of the
interlocking implications of the objections and replies. The following
discussion of the implications of biological explanations of morals is
no exception.

Some moral skeptics argue that Darwinian explanations of the origins
and persistence of morals among humans undermine the likelihood that
moral beliefs are true and hence undermine the possibility of moral
knowledge. These “debunking” arguments are discussed under three
headings. In each case we suppose, as Darwin suggested (Darwin 1982
[1871]), that human morality originated and persisted among our
ancestors primarily as an adaptation fashioned by natural
selection. This supposition is compatible with cultural evolution
playing an enormous role in bringing us from proto-morals to modern
forms of morality in all their striking variation. The basic thought,
however, is that primitive moral inclinations, such as toward helping
family and avoiding harm even to strangers, remain with us as prima
facie reasons for action, even when contrary moral considerations may
override these core inclinations. Thus, even though modern moralities
have evolved culturally, they are, on this premise, constructed from
certain core adaptations. That thought is well-developed in current
accounts of the evolution of morals (see Copp 2008, pp. 187–90, and
Campbell 2009, for a summary and references). While it is not beyond
criticism (see the entry on Morality and Evolutionary Biology), I will
assume this premise, for the sake of argument, without further
elaboration. Strikingly, this premise, if granted, is enough to give
weight to the three debunking arguments that follow.

Some debunkers argue that the Darwinian explanation of core moral
beliefs is in direct competition with the commonsense view that these
core beliefs are true and that we believe them because their truth is
obvious. They argue, however, that the Darwinian explanation of our
core moral beliefs is superior, since it is more parsimonious,
clearer, and better supported by the evidence (Ruse 1986; Joyce
2006; Street 2006: Kahane 2011). The Darwinian explanation is
better, first of all, because it does not need to postulate the
existence of any moral truth. We have seen in the preceding section
how difficult it is to explain in uncontested ontological terms what
moral truth might consist in. The things whose existence is
fundamental in the Darwinian story, on the other hand, are neither
mysterious nor contentious, such as the tendency to reciprocate
kindness and extend help to those in need. Moreover, the mechanism of
natural selection is, in general terms at least, very well-understood
and could be applied to the altruistic tendencies mentioned. Core
moral “beliefs” would be taken to express just such heritable
tendencies. Individuals in groups with more of these tendencies than
other groups would do better at survival and reproduction than those
in other groups so that the tendencies would in time spread among
groups in the larger population (Kitcher 1993; Sober and Wilson
1998). By contrast, theories about how our ancestors were able to
grasp moral truth, say by means of rational intuition or religious
faith, are comparatively unclear and do not cohere with current
science. Of course, we are assuming just for the sake of argument,
that the evidence that supports the Darwinian explanation is
cogent. To be fair, could we not make a parallel assumption about the
evidence for the truth of core moral beliefs? Unfortunately, it is far
from clear what that evidence would be unless it includes the truth of
some of the very core beliefs whose nature we are trying to explain,
apparently rendering the explanation circular. In sum, the commonsense
story of why we have the core moral beliefs that we do is inferior to
the simpler, clearer, and non-question-begging Darwinian
explanation.

An immediate difficulty with this debunking argument is that it
assumes that moral beliefs are not about moral properties that are
also natural properties and hence are empirically knowable and can
interact causally with other natural properties (compare Sturgeon's
reply to Harman in Sturgeon 1985; see also Campbell 1996, on
Ruse). Consideration of moral naturalism, that is, opens up the
possibility that those of our ancestors who tended to respond
positively to moral properties had an advantage in survival and
reproduction, because these properties are causally connected with
mutual well-being. There are many forms of moral naturalism that allow
this approach to the compatibility of moral truth and Darwinian moral
evolution (Brandt 1979; Sturgeon 1985; Railton 1986; Boyd 1988;
Brink 1989; Copp 1995, 2008; Churchland 1998, 2000; Sober and
Wilson 1998; Rottschaefer 1998; Casebeer 2003; de Waal 2006;
Campbell 1998, 2009; Kumar (forthcoming)). Though the success of such theories depends on
the details, they cannot be dismissed on the ground of parsimony,
since moral truths would not presuppose properties of a special or
non-natural kind. While the truths might be viewed as suspect in other
respects, for example, they would be both normative and natural
(Joyce 2006), we have already addressed such worries in the
sub-section 3.3 on moral naturalism. They are not new problems
occasioned by evolutionary theory. Finally, there is no special
epistemic problem of circularity when it comes to understanding
evidence for such a theory, other than what we have already discussed
in 3.3. In short, the debunking evolutionary argument from parsimony,
clarity, and non-circularity is by itself no threat to moral
naturalism.

In the past decade a new style of evolutionary debunking argument has
emerged that pits moral objectivism against the Darwinian origins of
morals. While moral naturalism in some forms may not be at odds with
understanding core moral beliefs as having a biological basis, such
beliefs, it is argued, cannot embody objective moral knowledge in a
robust sense. We must in effect choose between the Darwinian
explanation and fully objective moral knowledge. Sharon Street (2006)
presses this dilemma with careful attention to possible replies. She
acknowledges that the kind of moral naturalism advanced by Peter
Railton (1986) is compatible with the evolutionary basis of our core
moral beliefs but argues that the price of embracing such naturalism
is to give up thinking of moral truths as having the kind of objective
status that moral philosophers often attribute to them. She is happy
to pay that price, but others have contended that the assumption of
objectivity, in particular moral realism, is built into how moral
knowledge is commonly understood (Mackie 1977, Joyce 2006).For the
latter group the dilemma presents an attack on the existence of moral
knowledge, as most of us understand the concept. Since the aim of this
essay is to review the issues concerning whether genuine moral
knowledge is possible, we need to assess the merits of this debunking
argument, paying close attention to how the ideal of objectivity is
understood in this context.

Exactly what does the required objectivity consist in? Street,
following Russ Shafer-Landau (2003, p. 15), says that a moral truth
(or fact) is objective in the sense required by morality when it is
“stance-independent,” when, that is, it would hold independently of all
our evaluative attitudes, taken collectively, whether we have them now
or would have them on reflection under ideal conditions. Evaluative
attitudes include “desires, attitudes of approval or disapproval,
unreflective evaluative tendencies such as the tendency to experience
X as counting in favor of or demanding Y, and consciously or
unconsciously held evaluative judgments, such as judgments about what
is a reason for what, about what one should do or ought to do, about
what is good, valuable, or worthwhile, about what is morally right or
wrong, and so on” (Street 2006, p. 110). An implication of this
understanding of objectivity, as Street points out, is that it cannot
be the case that what we now take to be moral truths or facts are
objective in the required sense but could have been different, and
still objectively true or factual, if humans had evolved
differently. For example, the following cannot be objectively true: in
general people are not morally required to sacrifice themselves for
the entire community, but they would have been so required if we had
evolved more on the model of social insects. If moral truths or facts
were contingent on evolution in this way (as they would be, to give
another example, if moral facts were identified with facts about which
moral values would favor diversity in the human gene pool, Wilson
1978, p. 205), they could not be objective in the strict way demanded
by Shafer-Landau. (See also Kahane 2011, on the role of moral
objectivism in debunking morals.)

There are two ways to go if one wishes to defend the possibility of
moral knowledge against the argument from moral objectivism. One is to
reject the concept of stance-independent objectivity as a necessary
condition on moral truth. Studies show that even young children after
a certain age make an intuitive distinction between conventional
demands and moral demands (Nichols 2004). Basic moral demands unlike
conventional ones are taken to be independent of authority (for
example, that of a teacher in a classroom) and to be independent of
time and place (to apply universally to all persons). These features
appear to capture at least part of what it is for a moral demand to be
objective. Note, however, that these features are not enough to
guarantee stance-independence. For example, physical pain, considered
just in itself, is plausibly considered to be universally bad for the
person experiencing it, apart from what any authority might decree,
yet this moral truth is arguably not stance-independent. Why? An
essential part of what constitutes the experience of physical pain is
to have a sensation towards which one has a negative evaluative
response. This last part of the experience is what makes it bad for
the person suffering pain. But then, its being intrinsically bad is a
truth that is stance-dependent. If this argument is sound, we
must accept moral skepticism about the objective badness of pain for
the person suffering it or else understand the intrinsic badness of
pain for the person who has it not to be objective in this strong
sense. (Street offers a more complex argument to the same conclusion:
Street 2006, pp. 144–52.) Given this dilemma a possible line of
defense is to argue that in light of such examples the objectivity of
moral truth does not entail stance-independence.

The other option is to meet the challenge head-on and argue in the
case of a particular moral theory that core moral truths in this
theory would be stance-independent and also compatible with the
Darwinian evolution of morals. David Copp (2008) pursues this course
of argument using his society-centered moral theory sketched
earlier. He argues that because moral truth on his theory concerns the
needs of human society, one can expect that under propitious
conditions the more biologically fit moral inclinations would tend to
track (or “quasi-track,” his term) certain core moral truths. Copp's
argument is complex, but it presents a possible avenue of defense that
is worth consideration.

The third line of thinking that puts the evolution of morals at
loggerheads with moral knowledge arises from recent developments in
moral psychology and neurobiology. In the past decade several
prominent psychologists have applied the emerging dual process model
of the brain to design experiments to reveal how we process moral
judgments (Greene 2008, 2010 (Other Internet Resources), 2013; Haidt
2001; Cushman et al. 2006). One type of thinking (system 1)
is fast, unconscious, automatic, intuitive, and guided by
emotions. The other (system 2) is slow, conscious, deliberate,
reflective, and devoid of emotion. Though there remains considerable
controversy about the details (Berker 2009; Greene 2010 (Other
Internet Resources), 2013), various experiments, including fMRI brain
studies, suggest that deontological moral judgment, where one assesses
the moral acceptability of actions apart from their consequences, is
guided solely by system 1 thinking while consequentialist moral
judgment engages system 2. Since processing in the latter case is
unemotional, entailing reasoned comparison of possible consequences,
only consequentialist thought is properly associated with the rational
moral appraisal of actions. Notably, the latter thinking is regarded
as less primitive from an evolutionary standpoint. By contrast, system
1 thinking, being tied to intuitive emotional judgments, represents an
adaptation that was once useful but has by now largely lost its point
given the challenges of life in modern technological society (Greene
2008, 2010 (Other Internet Resources), 2013; Singer 2006; but see
Gigerenzer 2008 and Railton 2014 for a contrary perspective on
intuitive moral judgments). These claims, when taken together, form
the basis of a psychological/evolutionary argument to debunk
deontological moral thinking as unreliable and irrational.

The story taken just this far, whatever its merits, appears to allow
the possibility of moral knowledge grounded in consequentialist
reasoning. All the data used to draw negative conclusions about
deontological moral thought, however, can be interpreted to support a
broader debunking argument, since consequentialist thinking requires
not only reasoned calculation of the probable effects of alternative
actions, but also judgment about whether these effects are good or bad
(Kahane 2011, pp. 119–20). In the latter respect, system 1 would play
an essential role. If system 1 contaminates the rationality of
deontological judgments, given its emotional and primitive
evolutionary nature, the possibility of consequentialist moral
knowledge would be undermined in the same way. Though one might reply
that moral beliefs formed by thinking about the consequences of
actions arise in part from reasoning, the core part of the belief,
concerning whether the consequences are on the whole good or bad, is
not itself rational but emotional (following the logic of the
argument) and hence cannot qualify as rationally justified, as it
would need to be in order to qualify as moral knowledge. In effect,
the possibility of moral knowledge is foreclosed no matter what kind
of moral belief is in question. (See Kahane 2011, for a careful
elaboration and evaluation of the ensuring global normative
skepticism.)

Though the question of whether the data support a dual process theory
of brain activity and whether moral thinking divides up in the way
described is hotly debated, a larger and equally serious problem
concerns the assumed opposition between emotional and rational
thinking. Many experimental studies of practical reasoning yield the
opposite conclusion, namely, that emotional processing of information
plays an essential role in prudential reasoning (de Sousa 1987;
Damasio 1994; Woodward and Allman 2007; Bloom 2013; Railton
2014). Emotional processing is especially important when the relevant
variables are too many and too complex to process entirely through
conscious reasoning, so that rational thinking and rational behavior
depend on the emotional capacity to feel one's way through practical
problems. There is no principled reason why the same would not be true
in complex practical deliberation about moral issues (Allman and
Woodward 2008). Research in this regard has only begun, but even now
it is questionable to assume without argument that the reason-emotion
dichotomy presupposed in the third type of debunking argument is
trustworthy enough to rule out moral knowledge, even if all moral
judgments have the emotional basis claimed.

Recent developments regarding moral consistency reasoning underline
the role of emotion in moral reasoning (Campbell & Kumar 2012,
2013; Kumar & Campbell 2012, forthcoming; see also Wong 2002 on
analogical moral reasoning). Return to Singer's example of a man
seeing a toddler about to drown in a shallow pond and knowing that the
only cost of saving her life would be ruining his new suit. One can be
expected to have feelings of strong disapproval toward anyone who did
not try to save a child in any similar situation. Suppose, however,
there is another situation, say one in which someone's life is at
stake and that person can be saved at no more cost than losing a new
suit, say by giving funds for famine relief. If one does not feel as
before about this new situation, then there should be a moral
difference between them to explain the difference in emotional
response, or else one is being morally inconsistent in one's moral
emotions. Moreover, this kind of moral inconsistency is morally
culpable, revealing one not to be fully morally trustworthy as a moral
agent. Singer argues, in fact, that one's response to the opportunity
to provide funds for famine relief (at least equivalent to the cost of
a new suit) ought to be the same as in the pond case, since (he
claims) there is no morally relevant difference. (He considers various
candidates for difference but argues that thinking they are morally
relevant results in further inconsistencies depending on the
candidate.) When there are no relevant moral differences between two
situations and the moral import of one's response to them is
different, both responses cannot be morally justified. Though Singer's
focus is on whether one's moral obligation is the same, the logic of
his argument would be the same whether the inconsistency is between
moral beliefs or moral emotions. In general we are expected to be
morally consistent in our moral beliefs and in our moral emotions.

Sometimes moral beliefs and moral emotions can diverge, yet it can be
rational to trust the moral emotion rather than the moral belief. In
Section 3 we discussed the hybrid conception of moral judgment that
allows for this kind of separation of belief and emotion. One of the
examples was that of a woman who feels strong moral resentment at
having been passed over for promotion in favour of someone whose
performance was inferior to hers. It is possible that she doesn't
believe that she has been wronged, perhaps because she believes the
man performed better and her feelings are not trustworthy. Suppose
that her resentment persists, despite her efforts to ignore it. Must
her moral emotion then be irrational? Imagine that she feels
resentment because in fact she can recognize no morally relevant
difference between her case and that of the other that would explain
why she wasn't promoted. Even if she does not at first consciously
think about it in this way, her resentment can arise because her
emotions have been attuned to respond to other cases where a promotion
has been granted unfairly and where in retrospect there is no doubt in
anyone's mind (like the pond case) what would have been the right
thing to do. In short, her moral emotion may be rationally grounded,
if there exists no morally relevant difference between her situation
and one in which the morally right response is not in doubt from
anyone's perspective but is contrary to the decision made in her
case.

The idea that emotion may enter unconsciously into good reasoning and
yield a moral emotion that has a better rational basis than a person's
consciously held beliefs may seem surprising. However, there is a
growing literature in cognitive science over the past decade that
supports the cognitive sophistication of our affective system that
operates largely unconsciously in practical decision-making. For an
illuminating review of these developments that links insights of
Aristotle and Kant to the unconscious cognitive work done by our
evolved system of “affective attunement”, see Railton 2014. The lesson
is not that belief and emotion do not generally cohere in moral
judgment, but that emotion is itself cognitively complex and can make
its own independent and rationally based contribution to moral
judgment.

Thus far we have not addressed directly the question of methodology in
looking at the question whether moral knowledge is possible. In the
past several decades, however, four new methodologies have gained
prominence and the import of each for the possibility of moral
knowledge has been widely debated. Some who support the movement to
naturalize epistemology, for example, endorse the possibility of moral
knowledge; others do not. Either way, the new philosophical
methodology contained in the movement raises new issues for moral
epistemology to resolve.

What is this new methodology? Quine, who introduced naturalized
epistemology four decades ago (Quine 1969a), urges epistemologists to
renounce the project of explaining knowledge a priori, from first
principles, thus independently of science. The traditional approach to
knowledge had been to reason about the possibility of knowledge and
about the kinds of things that can be known without assuming from the
outset that we already possess considerable knowledge through science.
Even the classical empiricists, who argued that knowledge derives
ultimately from sense experience, defended this perspective without
relying primarily on scientific theories to establish their
conclusions. Hume, in particular, was led to a skeptical conclusion
regarding the possibility of justifying the methods used in reasoning
from experience. He thought any justification of inductive reasoning
that uses such reasoning would be circular (Hume, An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Sections IV-V). Quine,
however, dismisses such circularity as a problem for two reasons.
First, the prospect of reasoning independently of all empirical
assumptions is a will-o-the-wisp, and second, the most troubling source
of skepticism arises from the present scientific understanding of how
perception works and hence should be resolved by science itself. Thus,
Quine advocates that epistemology be carried out within science.

Though this suggestion is highly controversial and not all who
follow Quine's lead are prepared to endorse the radical form of
naturalized epistemology in which epistemology becomes part of science,
the idea of enlisting science in the task of understanding how
knowledge is possible has gained wide acceptance (Kornblith 1994). We
need to consider, then, what the implications are for moral
epistemology in particular. Does naturalized epistemology logically
entail moral naturalism? In fact, their relationship is more complex.
It is possible to accept the former but reject the latter without
evident contradiction. Many philosophers who are attracted to
naturalized epistemology believe that the natural world is morally
neutral in itself. From their standpoint the project of naturalizing
epistemology is only to understand how non-moral knowledge is possible
by drawing on the resources of science. Quine himself is in this
category. On the other hand, it is possible to believe that moral
properties are natural properties but hold that the principles of
reasoning that allow one to reach this conclusion are not themselves to
be explained by science. It is one thing to think, for example, that
acting rightly is the same as maximizing pleasure over pain; it is
quite another to think that science can tell us whether these
properties of actions are at bottom the same.

Nevertheless, while naturalized epistemology and moral naturalism
are logically distinct, it is arguable that anyone who subscribes to
naturalized epistemology and believes that moral knowledge is possible
should be a moral naturalist. For if moral knowledge is part of
knowledge and all knowledge is to be explained within science, then
moral knowledge itself must be explainable within science, and that
would be possible, it would seem, only if moral properties were natural
properties that we learn to identify empirically. There exist, however,
several major problems for anyone who endorses both moral naturalism
and naturalized epistemology, at least in the radical form advocated by
Quine. The reason is that the strategies that seem promising for
addressing standard objections to naturalized epistemology are in
tension with the possibility of moral knowledge. Consideration of two
standard objections shows how strategies for coping with them can lead
to difficulty.

5.1.1 Losing the normative dimension of moral knowledge

One standard objection to including epistemology within science is
that science is committed to providing only an adequate description of
the natural world and cannot tell us the world ought to be.
Epistemology, in marked contrast, is a normative enterprise. It is
supposed to tell us how we ought to reason from evidence and
how we ought to justify our beliefs, not merely tell us how we
do reason or how we do go about justifying them. By
including epistemology within science, therefore, we rob it of
normative content that is essential to its being epistemology (Kim
1988). A promising reply is to dispute the assumption that science is
merely a descriptive enterprise, lacking in any normative content. It
may be argued that in science the normative and the descriptive are
both present. Not only are normative assumptions implicit in scientific
practice, but these assumptions can be the subject of intense debate
and reflection within science. Indeed, any adequate description of
scientific practice bears out this sociological observation. The
objection rests on a false premise (Campbell 1998).

The problem is to work out this line of reply for naturalized moral
epistemology. What is often a matter of intense debate is what
standards of evidence are appropriate for testing a certain type of
theory. Normative concerns are present in the form of worries about
epistemic standards, such as the role of statistical significance in
psychological experiments. But epistemic standards are not moral
standards. To develop a parallel defense to the charge that the moral
dimension is missing from naturalized moral epistemology, we would have
to argue that moral values are operating in science and further that we
can decide which moral values are appropriate for science through
scientific debate. Many would agree that moral values, such as honesty,
trust, and loyalty, do operate in science, but not many are prepared to
concede that matters critical to moral epistemology can be decided by
the methods of science. Can science tell us, for example, how we would
know when honesty should be sacrificed for the sake of loyalty?

In the face of this challenge it may be tempting for a believer in
the possibility of moral knowledge simply to reject the project of
naturalizing moral epistemology. An immediate difficulty in taking this
way out is the close connection between this project and moral
naturalism, together with the role that the latter theory plays in
addressing the ontological problems raised in section 3. Earlier
we noted how the naturalizing project in moral epistemology can lead a
believer in moral knowledge toward moral naturalism. The reverse is
also true for a person who accepts a naturalized epistemology for
non-moral knowledge. If such a person thinks that moral features of the
world can be found among its natural properties and that these
properties can be investigated empirically, she will have a hard time
explaining why science is incapable of explaining what these moral
properties are and how we can know them. In sum, we may need moral
naturalism to address the ontological problems for moral knowledge, but
then we are led to a naturalized moral epistemology and to the
challenge now before us.

One source of resistance to moral epistemology being part of science
may be the picture of scientists trying to decide moral questions by
reference to graphs, lab reports, and print-outs from machines, as if
the answer to moral questions might be read off of data sheets. We have
already noted that his picture of scientific practice is excessively
narrow. It fails to reflect the fact that scientists debate the
implications of their data and debate the merits of the epistemic
standards used in their debates. The key issue then is whether it is
possible to draw a line between these debates and moral ones and to
declare moral debates to lie outside of science proper. Although Quine
apparently thought this possible, his holistic approach to matters of
evidence suggests otherwise. If moral beliefs have truth-value, as
moral naturalism implies, then the “web of belief” to which Quine often
alludes would include moral beliefs (White 1986, Jack Nelson 1996).
Recall that a moral naturalist will invoke moral facts to explain
certain non-moral facts, for example, the fact that American chattel
slavery was so morally repugnant to explain, in part, the extent of the
resistance to it at the time of the American civil war (Sturgeon 1985).
If this kind of interaction between the moral and the non-moral is on
the cards, it would be odd to preclude moral questions a priori from
scientific discussion.

A number of recent articles and books have defended a holistic
approach to the place of moral value within scientific and other
empirical investigations, recognizing moral claims as being
epistemically interdependent with claims about non-moral facts (White
1981, Sturgeon 1985, Miller 1992, Lynn Nelson 1996, Rottschaefer 1998,
Campbell 1998). Though a review of that literature is beyond the scope
of this essay, it is worth stressing that this conception of science is
not widely held and that if it were generally accepted by scientists,
then the practice of science would change significantly. The position
that is entertained here in response to the last difficulty is not that
current science routinely and effectively engages in moral discussion,
much less that current science provides a model for such discussion.
The point is that there may be no principled reason to exclude this
possibility for the future direction of science and that there may be
principled reasons to allow it, given the epistemological implications
of moral naturalism.

5.1.2 Global skepticism and the problem of circularity

A second standard objection to naturalized epistemology is that it
gives up the project of answering the global skeptic and as a
consequence fails to address, much less resolve, a central issue in
epistemology. It must surrender this project because by operating
within science it assumes that we already have some knowledge and hence
begs the question against the global skeptic. For example, Quine
appeals to Darwin to explain why our native inductive tendencies (used
say in tracking the location of middle-sized objects moving in our
immediate vicinity) must do better than chance in getting the right
answer or else the tendencies would have been selected against long ago
(Quine 1969b). Yet in assuming that we have good inductive grounds to
believe Darwin's theory of evolution, we justify induction by assuming
that it is justified and thereby reason in a circle.

Two kinds of replies to this objection are worth considering. The
first, suggested in the brief statement of Quine's new methodology, is
to reject the old problem as based on the false presupposition that one
can vindicate scientific and other knowledge on the basis of
propositions that are knowable a priori. The difficulty with this
response is that it raises the difficult issues of whether a priori
knowledge is possible and whether we can determine an answer to that
question a posteriori. Another reply, perhaps more in keeping with the
spirit of naturalized epistemology, is not to dismiss global skepticism
out of hand, but to allow science to attempt to explain science within
its own terms, recognizing that the effort will be circular but
defending its legitimacy. The effort is legitimate, it might be argued,
because the circularity does not guarantee the success of the effort.
The appeal to Darwin, for example, may not succeed, either because
Darwin's theory is overthrown or because a necessary background
assumption (say that our native inductive tendencies are gene linked)
is contradicted by the evidence. In fact, Quine allowed that the
project to explain science from within science could defeat itself, in
the end vindicating the skeptic (Quine 1981, p. 22). On this approach
knowledge claims are always open to questioning and perhaps rejection
down the road. Any justification that is offered for induction or
claims of knowledge based on induction is ultimately fallible and
revisable.

Can this kind of answer to the circularity charge be extended to
naturalized moral epistemology? Can we offer the moral skeptic the same
kind of reply? It may be that we cannot, since the two cases appear to
be importantly different. While we may consider global skepticism an
interesting theoretical challenge, few of us feel the need to address
it before getting on with our lives. We may be content to follow the
advice that we assume that we already know many things and then (if we
are so inclined) attempt to explain how we know so much, relying on
what we already think we know. With moral skepticism the situation
appears different. Most of us are far more prone to doubt the
possibility of moral knowledge than we are to question whether we know
anything at all. Moral doubts affect our confidence in making daily
moral decisions. Thus, to follow the former advice and assume for now
that we know what we believe we know in order to justify our decisions
may seem to be illegitimately circular. The need for justification is
more pressing in the moral case; hence, the methodology of justifying
our moral beliefs by allowing ourselves to believe about moral matters
what we have been raised to believe is more questionable (Campbell and
Hunter 2000).

The defender of naturalized moral epistemology can reply that
however urgent justification may be, no alternative exists to relying
on background assumptions when we try to justify specific claims. At
times the justification of non-moral knowledge claims can be similarly
urgent, as in deciding political, economic, or environmental policy.
What is in doubt need not be the moral importance of, for example,
preventing certain harms, but rather the means to achieve this end. In
these cases we will seek statistical and other evidence to support our
beliefs, but there exists now a firm consensus among philosophers of
science that the justification provided by evidence for a hypothesis
will depend for its credibility on theoretical background assumptions.
These in turn may require defense, but in general there is no way to
proceed but to assume something that we think we know until we have
sufficient reason to reject the assumption. In this respect, the
defender of naturalized epistemology can say that moral knowledge and
non-moral knowledge are on a par. This response is of a piece with the
reply to the last challenge in that it appeals to the holistic nature
of justification. Unless this appeal is blocked somehow, moral
knowledge remains a viable possibility when moral epistemology is
naturalized.

Two allied methodologies need to be mentioned that arose along side
of naturalized epistemology in the last century. Goodman introduced the
concept of a reflective equilibrium in addressing the problem of
justifying induction (Goodman 1955). Rules of inference would be
formulated to explain what one takes to be valid scientific reasoning,
much as one might formulate deductive inference rules to explain valid
inferences of mathematicians. Application of these rules may, however,
yield conclusions that are contrary to one's considered judgment in a
given case. Then a choice is necessary between revising one's judgment
to bring it into line with the systematic implications of the other
specific judgments, or else revising the rules (with the possible
consequence that a similar problem will arise in another quarter). One
proceeds until reaching (for the time being) a reflective equilibrium
in considered judgments, including judgments about the rules that best
explain one's inferences. The proposed methodology is like that of
naturalized epistemology. It begins by taking for granted, at least
initially, that the methods of science are sound and then attempts to
formulate the principles that explain it by working within science,
revising the principles or the practice as necessary to achieve a more
coherent overall understanding. A significant difference is that the
method seeks explicitly to arrive at acceptable normative
principles.

Rawls self-consciously applies the concept of reflective equilibrium
in explaining the method of justification underlying his theory of
social justice (Rawls 1971). Rawls applies the methodology, of course,
to justify considered moral judgments found outside of science.
However, he takes no judgments to be established simply a priori. The
claims about justice are justified in part by their implications when
taken together with what we assume to be known in psychological,
social, and economic theory. Others have elaborated this methodology
so that a “wide reflective equilibrium” would be reached
only after consideration of relevant background assumptions, regarding
such things as personal identity and rational choice, as well as
relevant alternative theories (Daniels 1976). Still others argue that
wide reflective equilibrium reasoning should not be confused with a
different but complementary reasoning that directly compares opposing
moral judgments about particular but similar cases without reference
to general principles. Moral consistency reasoning, as it is called,
can support but it can also undermine wide reflective equilibrium
reasoning. Both may be needed to reach morally defensible conclusions
(Campbell 2014).

A complication is that the justification of moral claims in Rawls
proceeds also by arguing that rational persons in a hypothetical
“original position” of freedom and equality would be rational to choose
certain principles of social justice. Though in this appeal to rational
choice Rawls is explicitly engaged in a social contract theory of
justice and thus a particular type of normative theory, the
implications are more general. The larger suggestion is that moral
truth is based significantly on which moral norms can be rationally
chosen by members of a given society as norms under which they would be
prepared to live. (Compare the accounts of moral truth in Brandt 1979,
Copp 1995, and Braybrooke 2001, none of which defend social contract
theory, but all of which base moral truth on rational choice. Gauthier
1986 appeals to rational choice to determine which moral norms are
justified but without supposing that moral judgments have truth
value.)

The methodology of basing moral truth on rational choice and the
methodology of invoking the ideal of a reflective equilibrium of
considered judgments both endeavor to square moral knowledge with a
scientific world view and as such are allied with naturalized
epistemology. Both, however, explicitly make room for normative claims
and so avoid the charge that the normative dimension is missing from
their account of moral knowledge. Unfortunately they face the charge of
making moral truth more likely than not to reflect the moral status quo.
Let us allow that a person may come to revise many beliefs, including
many moral beliefs, before reaching a wide reflective equilibrium in
judgments. Why should we think that the most stubborn moral judgments
in a given reflective equilibrium are more likely to be true than the
ones that gave way to them in the process of reaching a reflective
equilibrium (Copp 1985)? The reply may be that this approach is no
worse off than naturalized epistemology, since we must take some moral
claims for granted, at least tentatively, and proceed until there is
reason to revise our judgments given their lack of fit with everything
else we think we know. Moral conservatism is also a problem for the
methodology that bases moral truth on rational choice, since rational
choice turns on individual preferences and these are inevitably shaped
by the moral status quo (Babbitt 1996 and Campbell 1998).

Building on the pioneering work of American pragmatists, notably
William James (James 1907) and John Dewey (Dewey 1922; Dewey &
Tufts 1932), Philip Kitcher (Kitcher 2011a) has recently revitalized
the pragmatic, naturalistic approach to moral knowledge evident in
earlier thinkers. (For his general defence of pragmatism, see his
papers in Kitcher 2012.) Like naturalized epistemology,
“pragmatic naturalism”, to use his term, eschews appeal to
a priori knowledge but also rejects the ideal of moral knowledge of a
reality to be discovered in nature that is static and not under human
control. Pragmatic naturalism is thus distinct from ontological
naturalism already discussed above in 3.3. Though principles of
rational choice can play a role in moral learning on this view, all
principles are open to revision and, more importantly, grounds for
moral change need not appeal to a reflective equilibrium of principles
and judgments. Instead, moral knowledge is part of a long cultural
evolutionary process of humans working out among themselves how they
can live together, initially in small groups, through imposing
constraints on their interactions and setting goals consistent with
them that they can strive toward collectively. Moral knowledge is
moral “know-how” that emerges first out of primitive tendencies
fashioned by natural selection and from cooperative efforts within
groups to live peacefully while competing for resources with other
groups. Alliances between groups form when necessary and in some cases
codes of conduct apply to allied groups. Humans achieve moral
progress, not by discovering truth that exists apart from their
societies, but by fulfilling the various functions of ethical norms as
these functions gradually emerge through engagement in “the ethical
project”.

Such pragmatic naturalism, as moral epistemology, has strong
affinities with the methodologies just canvassed and shares many of
their virtues. For example, when discussing cases of moral progress,
such as the abolition of slavery in the United States and improvement
over the last century in civil status of women in Europe and the
United States, Kitcher focuses on the reasons for moral change that
were in fact operating in these cases rather than on principles that
might rationalize the changes without necessarily explaining
them. Like naturalized epistemology the focus is on looking for the
reasons that are also causes. Like reflective equilibrium theory and
rational choice theory, the focus is sensitive to tensions within
moral perspectives both theoretical and practical, such as the
apparent contradiction of maintaining the view that women as wives and
mothers should not be educated while having to concede, as Mary
Wollstonecraft argued (Kticher 2011a, 148–50), that they would better
fulfill their role in their families if they were educated or, as John
Woolman pointed out (Kitcher 2011a, 158–61), maintaining a Christian
view of the equal worth of every human while tolerating chattel
slavery. KItcher's argument in these and similar cases is that
improvement in moral knowledge was not achieved through the use of
general abstract principles but has depended instead on reconciling
conflicts of moral values so that their emerging functions are better
served. See also Elizabeth Anderson's discussion of how people learned
that slavery is wrong (Anderson forthcoming). At the same time,
because pragmatists, such as Kitcher and Anderson, focus on cases of
radical moral change from the status quo, the charge of moral
conservatism that faces reflective equilibrium and rational choices
theories of moral knowledge tends to be undercut.

We have to ask, however, whether pragmatic naturalism is a method that
yields genuine moral knowledge, since it seems to replace reference to
knowledge of moral truth with knowledge of the practical means for
resolving human conflict. Are not the two very different? Is not this
pragmatic understanding of moral knowledge, for all its virtues, an
impostor that really fails to signify something that has the
transcendent moral authority that we intuitively associate with
genuine moral truth? There is ample experimental work confirming that
all of us, including children, are able to distinguish conventional
authority from moral authority, where the latter is understood to take
precedence over what is claimed to be right by those in positions of
authority within a society or what current norms viewed as
authoritative are thought to imply (Nichols 2004). If that were not
so, it would have made no sense for advocates of moral change to hold
that conventional moral authority was violating the moral rights of
humans treated as property or unworthy of education. Kitcher tries to
address this problem by arguing that pragmatic naturalism allows a
robust conception of moral truth but one that is not prior to our
understanding of moral progress (Kitcher 2011a, 245–9). Another way to
address the problem would be to conceive of moral truth so that it
does not imply a realist conception of moral truth but one that is
robustly objective in that it allows the possibility of massive moral
error among would-be knowers despite all efforts to know the truth
(Campbell & Kumar 2013). Truth has been a central concern to
pragmatism from its inception (Misak 2013) and the problem of moral
truth bears critically on the viability of pragmatic naturalism as a
methodology for understanding the possibility of moral knowledge.

Another relatively recent development in epistemology is the
movement to view epistemology from the perspective of feminism (Jaggar
1983 and 1989, Code 1991, Anderson 1995, Alcoff 1996). The growth of
interest in this approach to epistemology is exceeded only by that in
naturalizing epistemology and at times the two perspectives are engaged
simultaneously (Antony 1993, Duran 1994, Nelson 1990 and 1996, Nelson
and Nelson 1996, Campbell 1998 and 2003). At first glance the prospect of a
feminist epistemology may appear to be a contradiction in terms.
Feminism is a political movement aimed at eliminating the subordination
of women to men, while the goal of epistemology is to establish and
defend, from a disinterested and impartial point of view, systematic
standards for knowledge or justified belief. How can a political
movement that is partial regarding the interests of women in relation
to men be disinterested and impartial? The idea of a feminist
epistemology, not to say a feminist moral epistemology, may therefore
appear incomprehensible.

Feminists have not been slow to recognize this challenge and have made
a variety of replies. (See Harding 1986 and 1995 for a comparative
study.) Postmodern feminists call into question the concepts of
knowledge, truth, and impartial justification. Others, however, would
agree with the assumption of this essay that it is possible to have
non-moral knowledge and to offer justifications that adequately
support the truth of non-moral beliefs. They maintain that a feminist
perspective is able to enhance rather than diminish the accuracy of
non-moral beliefs. For example, studies of coronary heart disease were
carried out for a long time only on men, based on the belief that the
results would apply equally well to women (Mastroianni et
al. 1994, pp. 64–66). In fact, significant differences
exist, but they came to light only after pressures to broaden the
studies. It is agreed on all sides, at this point, that the new
studies give a more objective picture of the development of coronary
heart disease in men and women. Notice, though, that this result is
entirely compatible with the change in the studies being motivated by
interest in women's health. The conclusion to draw is not that
political motivation is necessarily advantageous for achieving more
reliable theories but rather that it can be. Moreover, feminist
motivations can lead to the discovery of forms of partiality that have
distorted the truth and prevented access to relevant evidence. At a
still deeper level, feminists who accept the possibility of knowing
the truth have argued that epistemology itself can be transformed
through a better understanding of the ways in which partiality can
increase or decrease our chances of knowing the truth. They have
argued that it is important to understand how partiality can increase
or decrease the chances of knowing the truth when the truths in
question concern the subordination of women to men.

Feminists who accept the concept of truth are motivated, of course,
not simply by the desire to discover the truth about the subordination
of women (what forms it takes, how it comes about, where it has become
part of the practice of epistemology). They are also motivated by the
desire to stop it. This motivation is justified, most feminists would
say, by their knowing that the subordination is unjust and hence
morally wrong. At this juncture, one may want to ask how such feminist
epistemology could create a problem for the possibility of moral
knowledge. It would seem, on the contrary, that epistemology that is so
motivated depends for its rationale on moral knowledge.

The problem is that feminist criticism of knowledge claims that
reinforce injustice extends to claims of moral knowledge. Some
examples may help to clarify this point. Some libertarians have taken
it to be self-evident that each of us owns his or her own body and
whatever is produced through its labor, provided that the goods used
in the labor are freely and justly acquired so that their acquisition
does not leave others worst off than they were prior to the
acquisition (Nozick 1974). This premise is a basic building block for
some moral and political theories of justice. Okin (1989) argues,
however, that the premise leads to absurdity when one takes into
account the power of women to produce humans through their physical
labor, using sperm that they may freely and justly acquire through
purchase without leaving anyone worst off than before. An absurd
consequence of the theory would be that women own their children as
property whom they can dispose of at will. Not only is this result
morally absurd, but there is the further consequence that mothers
being the products of mothers both do and do not own themselves. She
argues that an inconsistency can also be produced for Rawls' theory of
justice, since it is so structured that justice does not apply within
families yet at the same time the theory requires it to apply there in
order for justice as fairness to be feasible (Okin 1989). In both
cases Susan Moller Okin, a feminist moral and political philosopher,
has criticized the foundations of a theory of justice by arguing that
its basic premises are gender-biased in ways that reinforce the
subordination of women to men. In one case, gender-bias occurs by
failing to count reproductive labor as genuine labor, in the other by
failing to recognize how injustice within the family is a major force
in creating and maintaining the subordination of women to men in the
public domain. (For discussion of related problems that arise from the
quest for impartial moral knowledge when it ignores human embodiment,
see Walker 1998, Bach 2012, and Babbitt 2014.)

In order to see how feminist critiques of bias in prominent theories
of justice lead to paradox, recall the feminist rejection of
impartiality as an epistemic ideal. As noted, feminist have defended
this rejection by noting that partiality can lead to more accurate
accounts of reality just as it can lead to distortion and
misrepresentation. Partiality that is positive in its results, as in
the discovery of the different development of coronary heart disease in
women, should not be rejected. In the heart disease example, however,
it is possible to ascertain the worthiness of the result independently
of the bias. Whatever led to the broader study of coronary heart
disease, the results of the study can be independently verified by
feminist and non-feminists alike. Compare partiality in the moral case.
Is it possible to know that the resulting feminist theories of justice
are more objective, less distorting in their representations of justice
than the theories under criticism? It may be hard to see how the truth
of the new feminist theory can be recognized independently of the sense
of justice that motivated the critique. Does the feminist sense of
justice constitute a partiality that leads to a more objective, less
distorting representation of moral reality? That depends on whether the
justice in question is identifiable independently of the feminist sense
of justice. If there is no understanding of true justice that is
independent of the partiality that motivates the critique of the
traditional theory, then the appeal to true justice appears
question-begging and self-serving.

What seems to have gone wrong is that feminists are in the position
of rejecting impartiality as a general epistemic and moral ideal, but
at the same time they want to reject gender bias because it obviously
fails to measure up to the ideal of impartiality. Louise Antony has
called this inconsistency “the bias paradox” (Antony 1993). It is a
paradox or at least has the appearance of one because there are
principled reasons for rejecting the ideal of complete impartiality.
Not only are there the reasons already given, but evolutionary reasons
exist as well for rejecting impartiality. Natural selection has
equipped us with the means to sort through massive amounts of sensory
information so that we can pick out and interpret quickly information
relevant to our survival. Without built-in “biases” of this nature we
could not begin to know anything about the world around us. Yet we also
want to reject biases that produce a “biased” (in a pejorative sense,
i.e., distorted) representation of the truth. Feminists and
non-feminists are in a bind, unless a principled way exists to separate
good biases from bad ones. Antony suggests that epistemically good
biases are ones that lead to finding out the truth, while epistemically
bad biases lead away from the truth. Although other epistemologists
have suggested that good epistemic standards may be distinguished from
bad ones by how well they lead to finding out the truth, Antony's
proposal is more radical, since she allows political biases to have
positive epistemic status when they are truth-conducive. But she grants
that much work remains to be done to make this resolution clear and
generally acceptable.

Does this suggestion help in averting the threat of circularity that
we came upon one paragraph back in reviewing feminist moral critiques
of gender bias in prominent theories of justice? Arguably it does,
provided that we understand moral fact as being independent of our
opinions about it and our procedures for trying to establish it
(Campbell 2001). That is, the suggestion helps, provided that moral
fact is understood either in the realist sense of fact (one not
reducible to what we can agree upon or what our methods would
determine) or in a sense of objective fact that allows for the
possibility of massive moral error whatever the efforts to the
contrary. At this point we may be inclined to ask whether it is
possible to know such moral facts? We should remind ourselves,
however, that the main reasons to doubt that we can know moral facts
are precisely the reasons that we have already examined under the
headings above. The objections labeled sociological, psychological,
ontological, evolutionary, and methodological are not aimed against
knowing moral facts in some non-literal sense of fact, but against
knowing moral facts in the same sense that we appear to know other
facts about the world. If the possible replies that we have canvassed
are adequate responses to these objections, then it is arguable that
we may avert the threat of circularity by Antony's suggested
resolution.

This result can be generalized, since it would apply to moral
criticisms of impartiality that arise because of concerns about racial
or class bias. (See Thomas 1992–3 for a discussion of the
importance of moral deference to the testimony of those in oppressed
groups.) If the resolution by appeal to realist fact is successful in
averting circularity and paradox in the case of gender bias, there is
no reason why it should not succeed in other cases in which an
epistemic standard is rejected on other moral grounds. Would the
resolution be relevant to the moral criticism of other epistemic
standards? An example in point would be the criticism by feminists and
non-feminists of purely individual-based standards of inquiry,
especially in science (Longino 1990, Hardwig 1991, Goldman 1999, and
Kitcher 2011b). Some of these critiques are partly moral, since they
emphasize the need for democratic values and trust in the context of
scientific inquiry. Arguably, they are also motivated by the
perception that the individual-centered modes of inquiry are at a
disadvantage in discovering the facts. If we accept the proposed
resolution of the bias paradox, we could argue that the change in
epistemic standards is justified on both grounds. In the case where
the inquiry is moral rather than scientific, can we imagine criticism
of epistemic standards other than impartiality? An example might be
criticism of the individual-based modes of moral inquiry presupposed
in intuitionism. As before, we would need a strategy to avert
circularity and paradox. If the strategy is to stick to a realist or
sufficiently objective conception of moral fact, its success will
depend on whether the problems canvassed above that confront the
possibility of such moral knowledge can be resolved.

This entry has addressed six major clusters of problems that
threaten the possibility of moral knowledge. Subject to the
constraints noted at the outset, the aim has been to examine these
problems with an eye to their complexity, especially their mutual
ramifications, and to explore avenues of possible resolution that are
evident in the philosophical and interdisciplinary literature. From
this survey, we can see that for each cluster of problems there are
avenues of resolution worth further exploration.

–––, forthcoming, “The Social Epistemology
of Morality: Learning the Forgotten History of the Abolition of
Slavery”, in M. S. Brady & M. Fricker (eds.), The
Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of
Collections, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Code, Lorraine, 1991, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and
the Construction of Knowledge, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.

Committee on the Ethical and Legal Issues Relating to the
Inclusion of Women in Clinical Studies, 1994, in Women and Health
Research Vol. 1: Ethical and Legal Issues of Including Women in
Clinical Studies, A. C. Mastroianni, R. Faden, and D. Federman,
(eds.), Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

de Waal, Francis, 2006, “Morally Evolved: Primate Social
Insincts, Human Morality, and the Rise and Fall of 'Veneer
Theory'” in Francis de Waal (ed.), Primates and
Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, Princeton, Princeton
University Press.

Dewey, John, 1922, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction
to Social Psychology, New York: Modern Library.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to David Copp, a subject editor for the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and to David Braybrooke, Victor Kumar, and Duncan
MacIntosh, who read a previous draft in full and caught numerous
mistakes and unclarities. I am also grateful to colleagues and
students in the Philosophy Department of Dalhousie University for
their vigorous discussion of parts of this entry.